!PhD scientists already undergo a kind of mentorship by "working for" his or her professor.
It's already known that a large percentage of scientists never learn how to write, and many believe either that "being smart" or educated in a field gives you all the tools you need to write, or that it is the job of the technical reader to figure out what the scientist or engineer said rather than the other way around. -rpg
I have been teaching a senior-level capstone course as a 'design studio' for 7 or 8 years. The idea was based on my one-year experience as an undergraduate architecture major, in which the studio course was the centerpiece of each semester. Our CS program requires each student to take one project course, and Intelligent Systems is one option. The first couple of years I taught the course in a traditional format with lectures and outside projects, but I always found that our best experiences in the class grew out of discussions of student work -- either difficulties they were having in their project or something they were so proud of that they wanted to share. Finally I decided to make presentation and discussion of student project work the focal point of the course. Other faculty in the department took this to mean that my course had no "content", despite the fact that my students continued to read a textbook, discuss it in class, and write essays (sometimes called take-home quizzes) about the material.
This approach has resulted in some disappointing projects but also some wonderfully surprising projects. And I'm convinced that nearly every student gained more from the course than they would have from me acting as a talking head. -- EugeneWallingford
We have just initiated an ambitous new degree program - Bachelor of Software Development - a competency-based apprenticeship. We are redefining almost every aspect of the teacher-student and participant-University relationships. Students will watch us (faculty) learn and fail as well as expound and explain. They will work side by side with practioner mentors on real projects for real customers. They will learn and immediately apply "learning modules" with the apprentice work providing motive, contect, and demonstration of ability in a short window of time. Entire curriculum is infused (tainted?) with my own biases in favor of people, community, philosophy, agility, and objects.
-- DaveWestI have recently joined the "ambitous new degree program" mentioned above in hopes of changing not only software development education, but also how work and learning are intertwined throughout one's life. My own life has served as an example in that my original degrees in chemistry, elementary education, polymer science have not been used per se in my career, but constitute a background for my studies in software development and computer science as well as for my work in industry. I have always worked on projects staffed by personnel who are new to the technologies they are using and have had to teach things I don't know and for which I can't hire resources. This has led to a style that involves posing a goal, eliciting possible approaches, discussing criteria for acceptance, and then scheduling frequent work/reflection sessions. I'm hoping this style will work well in the apprenticeship program. The constant dialog it inspires between what is required and what is known draws people toward an "evolving event horizon" (Kenneth Knoespel on Bakhtin) that should stand these students in good stead as their skills become the "gold standard" in software industry.
-- PamRostalToo true that far too many scientists and engineers don't know how to write clear and intelligible prose. Even worse, many of the few who can are not interested in or capable of producing visual aids such as drawings, charts, etc., to aid in understanding. This gets really silly sometimes; I have seen papers on geometry or on subjects using geometrical techniques that contained no figures. In part, I think this is a relic of the mid-century attitude that visual representation was somehow inferior to symbols, either words or mathematics, in part it is a lack of familiarity and comfort with visual techniques and tools.
IHMO, a class in technical drawing should be a requirement for any scientific or engineering degree, and life study or some similar artistic drawing class should be a strongly-recommended elective. Visual information is a very high-bandwidth channel for humans, and allows another way to say some things that provides useful parallax.
-- BruceCohen